Here is a very helpful extract from an Indian newspaper, Outlook India, which explains the fundamental importance of the Indian physicist Satyendranath Bose for the Higgs Boson:

"Given all the recent global newspaper headlines about the ‘God particle’, it’s interesting to look at its Indian connection—and at Satyendranath Bose, the legendary Indian physicist. For the ‘God particle’, of course, tis more correctly called the Higgs boson. And the boson itself happens to be named after Bose, for his work on “Bose-Einstein statistics”, which defines the boson’s behaviour. Serious physicists scoff that this connection is tenuous and naive, but there does seem to be a connection.

Bose was one of the great physicists of our time, and his name is clubbed together with Einstein, Niels Bohr and Max Planck. Many scientists express surprise that he never won a Nobel Prize for his work, especially since various other later physicists won a Nobel for work on concepts that had been pioneered by him. And, as some would ask, if Enrico Fermi (after whom the fermion was named) could win a Nobel, why didn’t Bose (after whom the boson was obviously named) do so?.

.........

In 1924, Bose—then only 30 years old—sent a paper to Albert Einstein, titled Planck’s Law and the Light Quantum Hypothesis, which had been turned down by an English scientific publication. Einstein was deluged with mail, but Bose’s paper caught his attention. Realising its importance, Einstein himself translated it into German, and submitted it to the prestigious Zeitschrift fur Physik, with a note saying, with obvious understatement, “Bose’s derivation of Planck’s formula appears to me an important step forward”. Bose’s work was acknowledged as a breakthrough in quantum physics, and Einstein himself was sufficiently influenced by it to work on a series of papers on what he termed ‘Bose statistics’. As a result, Bose became a celebrity worldwide. He spent two years in Europe, rubbing shoulders—and ideas—with greats like Einstein, Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg and Erwin Schrodinger. Bose’s name, interestingly, figures in Einstein’s biography, Subtle is the Lord, which notes, “The paper by Bose is the fourth and last of the revolutionary papers of the old quantum theory (the other three being by, respectively, Planck, Einstein, and Bohr).” An elite quartet, indeed.

Somehow, however, Bose has acquired the reputation of being a genius who didn’t work hard enough to make full use of his talents. Perhaps it was because he was known to be happiest in front of a blackboard with his students (which was why he wrote so few papers in his prime). Or perhaps it was his typical Bengali love of ‘adda’, which he and his group of friends perfected to a fine art, discussing everything under the sun, from physics to economics, politics and musicology, over endless cups of ‘cha’. Perhaps it was because he was such a diffident person (when he wanted to work with Marie Curie in Paris, for example, she informed him he needed to first learn French; he was too shy to tell her that he spoke French, as well as German, fluently).

Or perhaps it was simply because of his overly casual exterior. When Nobel laureate Paul Dirac visited Calcutta, for example, Bose was driving him around and insisted on piling some of his students into the car as well. When Dirac irritatedly hinted that the car was getting too crowded, Bose laughed, “Oh, we believe in Bose statistics here, Paul!”—a witty reference to the fact that in Bose statistics things tend to crowd together. There is also, it must be said, a group of scientists who believe that Einstein let Bose down: if he had helped Bose get his brilliant second paper published, they allege, he’d have almost certainly won the Nobel."

Mhmm. Thank you for the history lesson. Let's rehash every great scientist and mathematician every time we make a discovery from Pythagoras right up to whoever's discovery we are talking about. That seems to be the most efficient way to celebrate a great achievement

They are 99.999994% sure, which, btw is way better at their job than any other field. In fact they know exactly how sure they are. That's pretty God Dam n impressive.
Oh, and any level of 'sureness' in any field is fully subject to physics' own consistency, so, as far as your comment is concerned, Physics is fundamentally the most sure and accurate possible field in all of Human knowledge, since it underwrites everything we know.

It may be the Higgs Boson. Assume the Hadron Collider produced 100 Higgs Boson(HB) events. Multiply this by their mass value. This is the total HB production. It is much less than a microgram, but let's assume they got lucky.

Assume the cost of these bosons required an $11 billion dollar custom facility built in Switzerland.

Divide $11 billion dollars by 0.001 grams.

And the cost of the material by weight is over a billion times the value of gold!

Throwing 1000 gold bullion bars into the deepest ocean...that is a cheap date at CERN.

They just discovered the most expensive element in the universe!

And ironically even your shallow breath has a gigantonormous number of Higgs Bosons--but no one will pay you for it.

Higgs Bosons are the most the world's most expensive luxury that ironically can be found in common dirt.

If you like fast computers and want boring human work to be automated, then you will appreciate the particle physics and quantum mechanics that go into modern CPUs, graphics chips, solid state memory, RAM, communications, etc.

Science & technology raise the production possibility frontier and make us all richer. Maybe we need a tax on the hoarding of gold bullion to fund more science and make a contribution to the trajectory of output in the real economy.

That's the point - you don't see it. Because basic research is the firs step - the applications come later. Colliders gave us supercomputers (Which now are in every phone), fast memory, solid state memory, MRI scanns, WWW, grid computing, and many more technologies. We cannot predict future, but we can invest to discover it faster.

Oh, don't forget the $100s of Billions wasted on a worthless war in Iraq for big oil which will never benefit the taxpayer.
Of course the ~ 5,000 lives lost don't count.
Incidently I am a Vietnam Vet, another worthless war.
The benefits from the CERN will be seen some day.

Peter Higgs is a refreshing hero for science - after an era - post-DNA - when entrepreneurial media-savvy self-promoters ruled the game (beginning with James Watson of DNA fame), the beautiful character-ethic of Einstein was forgotten - that he placed science ahead of himself, and was uncomfortable with fame.

Hopefully the rise of Higgs (the man and the particle) will usher in a new era of dedicated modesty in modern science.

We live in a democratic, capitalistic society. Have you forgotten that? If it wasn't for those media savvy scientists we would have none of the modern technology that science has given us. It is considered a virtue, not a character flaw in physics to be able to communicate the complicated, deep and exclusive theories of physics to the public. These people are far more valuable than you think. Without them there would be no research budgets.

Btw, Einstein was far more politically and media savvy than you are giving him credit for.

I don't completely disagree - but I suspect we are at crossed purposes.

Media-savvy scientists can deliberately obfuscate (in my experience) in order to preserve their gilded empires and hide their logical failings; it is far less savvy, in self interested terms, to communicate simply and clearly, even tho it is to the benefit of science, funding etc etc

I too support a capitalist, liberal and democratic society - but accepting this is to accept the inevitability of human flaws such as greed and ambition. Sometimes these latter two are to the cost of more general progress, this is an accepted and lamentable flaw in capitalism - even though it is the best economic system we have yet found. A character ethic is still compatible, I think and I hope, with this system in any walk of life.

This article reflects a new low for the Economist. Pure gibberish! How can the reporter believe that a mortal can understand such a non sense. Look at this para:The model comprises 17 particles. Of these, 12 are fermions such as quarks (which coalesce into neutrons and protons in atomic nuclei) and electrons (which whizz around those nuclei). They make up matter. A further four particles, known as gauge bosons, transmit forces and so allow fermions to interact: photons convey electromagnetism, which holds electrons in orbit around atoms; gluons link quarks into protons and neutrons via the strong nuclear force; W and Z bosons carry the weak nuclear force, which is responsible for certain types of radioactive decay. And then there is the Higgs.

You are insulting yourself. Just because you are unable to understand it doesn't make it gibberish much less unworthy of a news article. The importance of the this discovery cannot be understated and the importance of the absence of US involvement, the supposed world leader in all things important, cannot be understated either.

Discovery of the electron laid the foundations for most of the tools you use for enjoying life.

Discovery of the photon and underpinings of electromagnitism laid the foundation for modern communications technology - and offers far higher communication bandwidths, optical computing for massive acceleration of single thread deterministic computing processes and solar power (amongst much else).

Quantum mechanics is the basis of modern CPUs, graphics chips, etc - and is also crucial for nuclear power (both the 1970s technology and nuclear fusion if we ever seriously invest in developing it). If/ when we succeed in building a large scale quantum computer, we'll enjoy a massive acceleration of NP-hard computing processes.

As the Euro Area declines into Depression, can we afford an underground mountain fortress in Switzerland that is the most expensive building every created?

And it cannot house one homeless Greek, feed a single child, or help the average person lose a few unwanted pounds.

The Hadron Collider is more massive than the Pyramids of Giza, involved more calculations than the Acropolis and used more logistics than the Great Wall of China..... but it lacks the tourism potential.

I see its future as survivalist underground bomb shelter for a post apocalyptic utopia. Mad and Absurd. But the Swiss prepare for contingencies. The whole nation can fit in there.

Time, Money and Resources are NOT UNLIMITED.

It is all about TRADEOFFS....where could we have spent $11 billion dollars more productively?

The EU, Norway and Switzerland have a joint GDP of 13.3 trillion euros. 11 billion euros for CERN is just 0.083% of GDP.

Over 10 years (and we're the project life is actually more than 10 years) we're talking about 0.0083% of GDP.

Peanuts.

And that tiny investment will (in time) radically improve our economic trajectory as it results in new processes and products.

Europe has no shortage of food or housing, and our children go to good schools. Yet investment in R&D is the basis of rising living standards.

I would claim the opposite of what you assert - we would have better material living standards over our lifetimes (at least for young people like me) if we were to invest radically more in R&D (I would propose raising retirement ages and cutting military spending to fund it).

(Incidentally, CERN is a tourist attraction - it receives over half a million visitors every year. Clearly, it really does provide an inspiration to young people interested in maths, sciences & engineering.)

I find US absence intriguing from such a huge experiment of discovery. It almost seems like the US is losing is drive for discovery. I might be reading into it bit much, I'm sure there are American scientists working on the LHC.

But, it certainly is quite interesting that the Europeans are the ones pushing these discoveries 500 years on from the Renaissance.

Einstein, The Curies (mostly Marie), Niels Bohr, Max Planck and many other Europeans pushed and discovered all sorts of weird and wonderful things in quantum physics and radioactivity and had a really good look at what happens on the sub-atomic level of matter. And America looked at it all and did something with it.

I am not a scientist, in the sense usually meant, for I do not seek outside, but seek to see what seems outside, from a true or innocent, perspective. So for me, the world is reflecting what could be called aspects of Mind - not the mind that we ascribe ourself and each other, which is a mutually learned active process of self-differentiation from Mind, in which we experience ourselves and the world 'externally'.
When we look out, we are seeing something reflected of our own Mind - that is not within the focus of the apparent control which we associate with our self, and which is not available to be known or seen directly from the perspective of the mode or mind of control - because the assertion of force as 'self', acts out an action- reaction loop in which Ground Awareness is effectively obscured by distractive identity.
I felt to essay this much, because truth is not a discovery of man but the uncovering of an awareness in which nothing contradicts itself or limits or sets apart to judge. To mere thought, this must read as nonsense, but to a willingness to accept a perfectly unified and indivisible being - exactly where the experience of selves and world is seeming to occur - it is like Everything coming into clear focus from a Perspective that had been forgot amidst the personal experience of action and reaction, which can now be observed empty of personal investment.
The Higgs field of our own mind is not unlike a veil or lens whereby an Indivisibility, is experienced as differentiated force and matter, space and time, observer and observed. It can hardly last an instant, yet opens a 'portal' through which manifest existence is expressed and experienced, not exclusively from a subjective view within its universe, but the Primary Awareness knowing Itself in All.
Human concept is inherently unable to articulate Indivisibility and can only make sketches that trigger an Intimate and thoughtless realisation, from which proceeds expressions of a like nature. Such expressions embody the qualities that are the foundations of true cultural renewal, because they are not a persistence of the reaction mind, but embody a fresh perspective.
Problem solving is addictive to many but the problem that is kept unsolved is of the division of our heart and mind. If mind 'goes off on its own' it creates it's own self-illusion. We should know this well by now, but are still asleep to our true nature while we collude in engaging such wishful thinking in e ery kind of guise.
I do not know what I am or what anything is.
Yet this realisation opens to That Which Is, by absence is self asserted identity and the realisation is Unspeakable, and confers no status nor advantage save that of apprehending truly.
Thank you for your attention.

I'm curious why this essay of silliness has 3 recommends. Either you've mastered the art of trolling or you're very confused. Nothing you said made any sense except the "I am not a scientist" part.

Examples of nonsense:
"The Higgs field of our own mind is not unlike a veil or lens whereby an Indivisibility, is experienced as differentiated force and matter, space and time, observer and observed."

"Human concept is inherently unable to articulate Indivisibility and can only make sketches that trigger an Intimate and thoughtless realisation"

"Thoughtless realization"? Contradiction maybe?

I normally don't respond to posts like these, but I'm kinda curious why people write stuff like this.

I appreciate the civility of your response.
For everything 'outside' I feel a correspondence within.
My admittedly poetic use of the Higgs Field as a name for what feels similar in function is not a scientific fact but perhaps a pointer to where to bring attention to - in the working of the mind.

While (some) scientists seek a Unified Theory of Everything, I put it that Indivisibility is Already Fact - but that a trick of the mind makes it SEEM as if an action of desire and intention has set off a chain of reactions whereby thought and its implied 'thinker' have an independent polarised existence in a tangibility of energy and mass.

The presumption of independent self is so all pervasive and deepseated as the foundation of our consciousness, that it is difficult to even bring it to question. (Though I see science is in fact deconstructing the 'self' as an actual entity just as it is clearing out wishful thinking about an external God).

Realization may find clothes in thought - and a thought may express some aspect of the breakthrough - but it truly is of an order beyond thinking. Thinking can be used as a term to include all aspects of mind - but I tend to use it for conceptual imaginative construct.

The old adage, "Be still, and know God" is not addressed to a thinking approach and isn't suggesting a coercive or controlled stillness of an imposed concept.
To experience without the interpretations and assertions and commentary of the separate self sense (thinking)is to at least glimpse and Indivisibility or wholeness of be-ing.

This intimate fact has absolutely no value for a mind engaged in its own constructs or pet projects, and so is rendered to be of no value (without mass). Yet the light of awareness is the (always and already) Context of everything you or I ever think and experience. It is Name-less and unspeakable because you cannot actually separate yourself from it to do so, (But in the imagination that we have (by defining self, other and world), is every human thought and its experience made).

Should this awareness stir within you, you may experience everything that the mind constructs as meaning - as completely unfounded and meaningless - not unlike an elaborate theory that turned out to be unfounded. Some aspect of this occurs for a lot of us in all sorts of contexts, but usually everything focusses upon regaining a solidity of self as if that was the only sanity - like keeping a well sealed lid over the deeper aspects of our consciousness and their associated fears and inadequacies.

The collusive and mutually self validating behaviour of human beings in constructing their reality runs much deeper than what is visible on surface. However the desire to KNOW - is also alive within us all - whether it has stirred in your life yet or not - and this may take all sorts of routes and expression, including scientific endeavour.

I do not feel any necessary or inherent division between spiritual enquiry and any other human endeavour so I include something of my perspective here simply as an invitation to meet without persuasion or assertion beyond the witness that I am able to articulate with this conceptual tool - amidst this particular cultural context.

Because I presume a different foundation, I will be perhaps very hard to understand because it doesn't extend the existing concepts so much as use them in a different way. But I am also very easy to pass by without hardly noticing. It isn't like anyone has to listen in if they haven't some interest moving already in their own mind.

If you skimmed my writing on any of my blogs you will at least find me consistent.

Why do I write?
Art is originally of the verb 'to be'. Thou Art. To open a channel of expression of being is a gift sharing itself.
Why do I sing?
Why do I dance?
Why do we love?

Silly questions to the ones in flow - but seemingly worthy of pursuing to those who see forms (think) without any sense of the spirit of which they express.

Now if it did - and it also provided a virtual sense of self independence such that I believe I am in fact thinking MY own thoughts - then it would no doubt be able to formulate a response for you and I would be (virtually) happy.

Are your thoughts (y)our own?
Or are they essentially programmed reaction?
Something IS present here. See a mind of reaction and validate it by 'using it'. Or disregard what has no validity to your conscious purpose.

What is the purpose ruling or aligning all things in (y)our life?
From a foundation, all else follows - but from a false foundation, all that follows is likewise false - no matter how rigorous and tested it is.

If I wrote to what you (all) already 'know' I would have nothing to add. In writing from where I feel the inspiration, I may have a lonely time of it, but I feel to lean to the potential of a Copernican shift in self awareness… anyway.

You have seen this epic discovery in physics and understanding of the universe well and truly intimately into its building blocks and you question what this human race has learned, discovered and, really, how is this possible? What is this Higgs boson really, how can it help us get to where we want to be? Do we even know? And epic, not so much as a Facebook status, as much as pointing the Hubble Space Telescope at a point of darkness in the sky and seeing light.

Dr.Bose was a great physicist and did seminal work towards understanding the bose einstein condensate.
He was also a very humble person.
The Boson family of particles of which the now discovered Higgs is a member; was named after him.
However, he did not postulate its existence or conceive its properties.
Still I believe that contributors from asia such as Bose have endured the rough end of the stick when it comes to recognition from the nobel committee.
Also often Asians don't acknowledge greatness in their midst, An example is Abdus Salam, an effortlessly brilliant man.
Dr. Salam's story has a poignant ending. He was an ahmadia, apparently not muslim enough for stupid islamists who defaced his grave in Karachi (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Grave_of_Abdus_Salam.jpg)
They might have actually written on his tombstone that he was not a muslim. Top that stupidity.
The guy died with a broken heart.

What's to admit, the problem is identifying the nature of that god (or gods, or...) Maybe there are some scientific experiments we can run, but first we need the right kind of theoretical foundation. Bows to Mr. Bose are indeed in order -- he shoulda gotten that Nobel!